Michael

A software developer and network engineer for over 20 years. Currently developing in Ruby, Rails, Javascript with sites powered through Apache, mongrel, mysql, postgres, and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and monitored via monit.

Getting mouse wheel to work with KVM and Ubuntu

Posted by Michael on November 3, 2008 in Servers, Systems

I have been busy getting a Ubuntu based Network Attached Storage server up and running as well as finally switching my trusty desktop to Ubuntu running my old Windows XP as a VMWare Server image.  All was fine and dandy until I decided to add a KVM to the mix so I could easily switch [...]

Jumpstarting your Virtual tour with Oracle VM

Posted by Michael on October 29, 2008 in Servers, Systems

Server virtualization technology has come a long ways in the last 18 months (today being a wonderful October 28, 2008 crisp, cold Fall Sunny day).  Here, I am going to take a look at Oracle VM, one of the relative newcomers to the game and show you how to quickly get up and running with [...]

Rails has and belongs to many (habtm) demystified

Posted by Michael on October 27, 2008 in CSS, Programming, Ruby Language

Every time I have to implement a many-to-many relationship between Rails models, I seem to have to figure out how to do it effectively all over again. Especially as Rails seems to evolve the relational hooks with better support and elegance. Here, I will show a has_and_belongs_to_many strategy that works well for me. Along the way, I’ll expose a few other minor tricks, such as adding a custom inflector for pluralizing your model or not adding the ID column on a table declaration.

Converting Oddmuse Wiki to Edgewall Trac

Posted by Michael on October 2, 2008 in Macs, Programming, Python Language, Ruby Language, SQL

Our company began long ago with wiki’s, but we chose the Oddmuse wiki way back when. These days, we’re heavy users of Trac wiki because of its integrated ticket support system. So what to do with all those old wiki’s that folks have stopped using and reading. The Oddmuse wikis still hold [...]

Changing ANSI colors in Terminal on Macs

Posted by Michael on September 9, 2008 in General, Servers, Systems

Probably the most frustrating experience I have had with Macs so far is figuring out how to change the ANSI colors in Terminal (Terminal.app) so that I can read the outputs of man and most especially ls and comments in vi when colorization is activated and I have chosen a dark background theme.
I am using [...]

Configuring ntpd to hand out time to local servers

Posted by Michael on August 11, 2008 in General, Servers, Systems

Syncing your servers to public time servers is one of the most common ways of keeping server times in sync. Apparently the less common approach of configuring one server to sync with public servers and it in turn becomes the authoritative time keeper for the rest of your servers is less well-known. Digging [...]

Pradipta’s Rolodex

Posted by Michael on July 18, 2008 in General

Something funny happened last night. A one, Max Archie from Indiana hired an India-based Call Center to find a couple of Ruby developers. Well, by and by, the recruiter mass-mails some 400 developers asking if they’re interested. Within about 10 mins, I had to 10 emails of somewhat ticked off developers begging [...]

Geocoded Zipcodes

Posted by Michael on July 7, 2008 in Ruby Language, SQL

You would think that loading up a database of zip codes would be an extremely simple case of finding a public database on www.usps.gov, and then loading up with a database bulk load. It turns out that, while the USPS does offer products for you to purchase, and a rather nice lookup interface for [...]

DRYing your Views

Posted by Michael on July 5, 2008 in General, Ruby Language, SQL

Let me start out by saying that I am finally beginning to understand a bit about that magical Ruby block notion and how implementing methods through block passing can really empower you as a Ruby developer. Thanks to, a most excellent Ruby tutorial, I am definitely feeling a good bit more empowered about getting [...]

Cross-browser AJAX updates to table elements

Posted by Michael on June 29, 2008 in JavaScript

It seems that one of the toughest Javascript challenge is to get your AJAX code consistently behave between browsers when you’re dealing with IE’s handling of table elements vs. Gecko and other engines. It took quite a bit of finagling to figure out exactly where the issues and trappings are. Most web developers [...]

Next Page